Skip to main content

tv   [untitled]    December 29, 2012 2:30am-3:00am EST

2:30 am
out of the lobbying presence in the u.k. and around the world they will do whatever it takes to stop any competition so they will vilify the internet though if they have to they'll have more pedophile scandals to try to make the paint thinner and the bad brush to stop the internet they'll do anything at any cost to stop competition from arising we can i can predict that with certain things well and you holding told the independent he said quote the model banking culture we have had since the one nine hundred ninety s. is on its way out instead we are seeing a much more diverse ecosystem emerging with the growth of new non-bank groups offering peer to peer lending and crowdfunding which are operating directly with a wider public and of course this all developed out of the sight of well all the elites and the monopolist and old accomplished so this is why you do you see i think crackdowns on the internet but it's kind of too late they didn't really understand the threat of the internet and how it can't really be taken down so you have this peer to peer lending you have crowd funding for all sorts of cultural
2:31 am
content you have bitcoin and i know that's now banned there is actually a big queen bank that is registered in france it's allowed to trade as a bank in france right fred look at the example of micro financing it totally transformed the banking industry in bangladesh. women were able to get money micro loans to take them out of poverty and it was so successful that the big banks swooped in and they destroyed that industry and the nobel prize winning inventor of the industry was thrown tossed to the curb. so this is unfortunately you're dealing with an entrenched monopolist oligarchies that will stop at nothing to prevent competition from coming to the fore if these new technologies and platforms gain critical mass then the banks will stop at nothing to get rid of competition that's that's unfortunately we have a whole gospelly in place i do think you know they could try all they want. but
2:32 am
there is a different sector there are people who know how to code right there are people who know how to innovate there are people and innovation is important is the mother of the necessity is the mother of invention and this is what and you whole thing does point out he says necessity is often the mother of invention now that the big banks are retreating from lending after the crash these new methods of financing could help fill that gap and you see this with the emergence of all sorts of local currencies this happens out of necessity not because people say spontaneously oh we just want to come up with the currency what happens is that you know the command and control currency of the dollar or the pound does not get to bristol because bristol is not on the radar of the city of london so they come up with the bristol pound to keep all the you know to keep transactions flowing to keep transactions happening if you look at africa there's a huge ecosystem of micro payments developing there without any of us teaching them
2:33 am
how to do this right but you're dealing with people all that are extremely dangerous for example when wiki leaks when they exposed the us military killing journalists in iraq from a helicopter that was ok but when they were going to expose bank of america for fraud to suddenly join us songes holed up in the embassy. across town also when mervyn king on the bank of england was implicated and live market reading scandal suddenly he's gone and they parachute in the central banker from canada mark carney to somehow he's going to make that go away that the fact of the bank of england was involved in a massive fraud so they're able to move the pieces and the global banking cartel in an extraordinary way again no competition wall rise that will challenge the entrenched old gaap list of positions of these banks i mean its course still what they can but the benefits will end up it'll be a step. in one way or another well i agree to disagree on there because i really
2:34 am
believe no empire on earth in the history of humankind has ever been able to thwart everybody they've never been able to stop the competition from emerging ultimately they might last for one hundred years rome did it for hundreds of years they kept anybody from challenging them for hundreds of years america maybe fifty sixty years so far but i think with this this disinter mediation now available from the internet but least and i don't think it can stop africa is no stranger to exploitation and colonisation they've been ignored and they have developed some interesting products in the telecommunications space in the kenyan phone market is leapfrog over the traditional phone market but again once it's critical mass it's going to be colonized by the foreigners as usual asia the asian financial crisis of one nine hundred ninety eight there was a crisis cooked up on wall street the city of london export it to asia and blew up that economy you know now they're buying dollars to protect themselves against
2:35 am
continue marauding by the opium dealing the british people who don't arrive with opium to sell asia but with derivatives products for the same effect get a whole junk securities again i'll disagree there because i think you know the asian financial crisis happened in the ninety's they learned their lesson they knew not to listen to the i.m.f. world bank or the all the goldman sachs and j.p. morgans of the world and they didn't suffer so much this last time they didn't have any of those toxic derivatives they knew that they weren't trash but another part of the global economy of course is wealth creation and jobs and a few years ago in two thousand and ten we covered andrew grove of the cofounder of intel and he was he wrote a piece in bloomberg opinion piece of called how to make an american job before it's too late and we were at the time he looked across america and here's a guy who created a huge global international multinational company creating wealth. and he said
2:36 am
quote it is impossible to innovate independently of the manufacturing an r. and d. base innovation is based on state of the art knowledge of what is being done and if the doing is done elsewhere the would be innovator will find himself at a disadvantage even fact what he said has turned out to be true manufacturing in the us is making historic comeback so general electric has a place called appliance park in louisville kentucky it was built in one nine hundred fifty one and at its peak in one nine hundred seventy three it had twenty three thousand employees now it got down to one thousand eight hundred sixty three employees but they had one water heater and it looks like a little r two d two machine and all of the brain is literally in the top the brain and they decided they started to look at the numbers and between natural gas prices being four times more expensive in asia between incomes in china being five times
2:37 am
what they were when they first moved over there and between the cost of oil which now you know a cost to transport from china to america they started think well maybe we could actually bring some manufacturing back to this to louisville and what they found was that once they took this geo spring water heater the one that they had been making and trying to and they brought it to louisville and i said quote we got the water heater into the room and the first thing the group said to us was quote this is just a mass not the product but the design in terms of manufacture ability it was terrible kevin nolan vice president of technology said yeah ok but talk to me about wages in other words ok so they're going to bring jobs back to the u.s. they can make the white goods for twenty percent cheaper and you factor in the lower cost for natural gas through fracking which of course doesn't account for the environmental cost but that's another issue so yeah a pool of workers in the u.s. that are now working cheaper than chinese but the wage consolation that's been
2:38 am
going on for. twenty years is fully in place so that the average income in america which is now i think something like fifty thousand dollars a year and getting weaker every year you know accounting for inflation is still going to be approaching that of the average chinese worker so the average chinese worker and the average american worker yes they will be making roughly the same as the u.s. brings jobs back from china to america did we need to go through twenty years' worth of union investigation through workers' rights evisceration through the vilification of workers and labor in america to get to the point where we have chinese slave wages in america yes that's what we needed to do thank you now we have a prison state that's growing by leaps and bounds and prison labor for the same out there making over in china fantastic so kevin nolan the vice president of technology found that the juice bring suffered from advanced technology version of ikea syndrome it was so hard to assemble that no one in the big room wanted to make it instead they redesigned it the team eliminated one out of every five parts it
2:39 am
cut the cost of the materials by twenty five percent so they point out that a funny thing happened to geo spring on the way from the cheap chinese factory to the expensive kentucky factory the material cost went down the labor required to make it went down the quality went up even the energy efficiency went out you know they had designed this product in the united states for years and they sent the product design to china but what they found was that you know in the beginning when they first sent it they knew how to make it themselves because they had been making it in america but what they found was the part doing here why is that. through this product you know but it's a wealth creating job. for general electric general electric well if you really all of the gains of the cost efficiencies the workers will not they will they're going
2:40 am
to labor costs there will going to new diploma the rate will continue to go up no matter how much more money general electric makes i think that is one thing when we're going to say well that's our end of the year show i mean i think you can write below tell if you agree with stacey or max because this is a show that we don't agree he thinks it's going to get worse i think it looks like there is actual positive sort of thing just by the very nature of the research and development and design that andy grove from intel it pointed out years ago it was going to fall apart he said just because the knowledge for the innovation you can't just teach innovation you need to actually experience it so that is wealth creation and that's what happens with a lot of general electric if you brought if you broke gen x. or company to twenty companies and you had real competition yes that would be great for wage wage earners in america but since it's an unfettered monopolist is gouging people there's no walmart of white goods manufacturing no there won't be any accrue
2:41 am
all benefits you can leave your comments down below other states however thanks so much for being on the cons report thank you alex stay tuned for the second half i'll be speaking to professor jonathan feldman. critique three. hundred three. ranger and three. free studio time free live free blog plug in video for your media project a free media. dot com. live
2:42 am
as. it. has. plenty. place . plin.
2:43 am
live live live. live. live. live. live live live live .
2:44 am
welcome back to the kaiser report i'm max keyser time now to go to new york and speak with jonathan feldman an associate professor at the department of economic history at stockholm university in sweden and a principal governor of the global teachin jonathan feldman welcome to the kaiser report. glad to be here max thank you all right first jonathan feldman what is the global teach in the global teaching was an attempt to network about twenty locations in seven continents to come up with a comprehensive program for economic change part of the background of this is the
2:45 am
work of people like the late barry commoner who recognize that not only did we have a huge economic crisis we had an environmental crisis and an energy supply crisis so all these crises crises are related to each other some might even go so far as to say we have a democratic crisis an intellectual crisis the latter being it in capacity building the issues so the global teaching was an attempt to vertical integration in terms of linking various issues that are usually separated by academy policy makers the media and also attempted horizontal integration to link places that are divided by physical distance so this happened in real time and we brought up people like bill mckibben and bob paul and john ridd in brian douglas deano and a whole number of intellectual activists and organizers in cities throughout the united states into britain does the net effect of this does it bring about a
2:46 am
a network of effect in terms of aggregating knowledge and information that's greater than the sum of the speakers or is it just a linear kind of lecture that people are getting as they would get in an ordinary classroom so in other words you've got this network of fact and we see now in the modern economy the network in fact happening on peer to peer networks in another new ways of organizing the economy is there any attempt to organize that type of extra now any within that network to take it to another level or is it just basically a series of lectures no no we really have to go beyond the lecture for matter what paula for a called the baking theory of knowledge for people like me knowledge and. it's part of the idea is to create infrastructure so for example if you developed a network with millions of millions of listeners these people could take their economic capital their capacity to do the banking as in the move your money campaign in britain which has moved over five hundred thousand persons have taken
2:47 am
their deposits out of high street banks and put them in turn into banks so the idea is to network the media capital in other words the audience and get them to take on other capacities that they have that the alienated from. can be not only a viewer and have the power of being a viewer but i could also be a bank deposit or i could be an activist in the workplace it can be activist in the university you can start doing things like if thousands of thousands of students watch this they could pressure their universities for example to engage in alternative banking forms and the other ideas that this this is just a moment in time even though of course it took place over about four hours the idea is to think of this is a kind of continuum so for example. the first process would be something like the global teaching which is supposed to deal with these intellectual deficits the inability to connect crises then the second stage is to get people to tune into this in after they tune into this they move their money into alternative banks take
2:48 am
up alternative utilities and then the next stage is after that to get these alternative banks and alternative you do till of these to support things like mass transit and then you get companies you chuck to go on to the supply side and leverage the demand capacities to create manufacturing the things we need in the real economy as opposed to what's happening in wall street which is supporting the you know the casino economy so a company like coca-cola ultimately where do they get their strength jonathan branding is one thing so that's why i kind of i'm a bit critical of this no logo idea i think we have to have yes logo i mean this is readily apparent in media like twitter for example what about incentivizing people to attack coca-cola stock as a way to do capitalize coca-cola as a way to send them a message that they're no longer welcome yes i've written a book called universities in the business of oppression where i documented universities trustee ties and the dominant vestments and all kinds of companies at
2:49 am
that point responsible for military transnational intervention in central america so this was supporting exactly what you're saying kind of divestment campaign so i think we have to mirror the ideas that they vestment to the ideas of proactive invest my. because otherwise we're just going to be in a reactive formation we have to take the offensive so to speak by creating our own kind of capital moral capital democratic capital well but moving beyond moving beyond divestment what about the idea of timing a global boycott with encouraging hedge funds to sell short stock in a company like coca-cola or starbucks in other words you tell the global hedge fund community that you're going to continue a boycott on a starbucks or a coca-cola into all the revenues of the company are sufficiently diminished that their stock price would go down and so therefore you're encouraging that global hedge fund community to sell that stock short to attack that stock to drive that stock to zero there you're leveraging this global hedge fund community in you are
2:50 am
a favor you're leveraging your actions in your favor with a multi-trillion dollar industry what about that well that's good i think also to get political capital to get organized in power to do these corporate campaigns of the kind that you're talking about we also have to have our own base of political power or capital you're talking about political capital i'm talking about capital capital because there's nothing that prevents you people on the campaign side from taking advantage of the falling stock price itself why not become a force on that side of the equation instead of just branding interruptions and culture jamming why not grab some of that capital why not capital capital your thoughts i'm not against what you're saying and i think it's a good idea but all i'm saying is you need to compliment that with our own kind of power and i'm not just talking about city again i would emphasize the not just talk about sitting at home listening you know in front of the computer or the t.v.
2:51 am
is the case may be and passively absorbing with said i'm talking about moving money into things like utilities into cooperative structures that set up mass transit systems because after all. places like detroit that don't even have mass transit and they have companies that are as of today trying to build mass transit in michigan a state that suffered from mass the industrialization so we have to take the idea of taking money out of these institutions with putting them in to alternative institutions that will give us more power to pressure the existing capital so i think what you're saying is important i agree with you that the u.k. is in many ways far more sophisticated than the u.s. in the jobs and climate campaign that's going on right now in terms of taking the move your money effort into the next step right another really disagreement there now another another campaign that's really been successful is the strike debt campaign where the activists are retiring dead buying debt from vulture funds for
2:52 am
pennies on the dollar and then retiring it just getting rid of it but i want to ask you a follow up on your reindustrialization comments you write and i quote economic demand is weak in part because wealth creation capabilities have eroded so let's talk about that a little bit you're saying that the answer is to reinvest your lies talk a little bit about that johnson feldman. ok great point is this state where i'm sitting in today new york state used to be the set of or the leading manufacturing state in the whole united states right now the situation is despite the claims of a recent book i picked up in the barnes and noble right now twenty one percent of people in new york city are in poverty the transportation workers union is suffering from outsourcing they're using black box systems to erode jobs and there are alternative models like the book the middle class fights back by brian d'agostino. the book by john ridd which is also about reindustrialization there are
2:53 am
models for making high quality jobs what happened partially not totally totally to explain the reason why they had there was this financial crisis is people had insufficient incomes they didn't have enough money to pay for their house and house after all of the right so we need to be paid so we can buy the basic necessities food housing shelter etc the middle class traditionally in europe and the united states has provided these so-called middle class jobs or more accurately higher paid working class jobs and this is been eroded by outsourcing by currency manipulation by laziness and incompetence on the part of industrial firms so there's a book called fit to manage which shows that a lot of the incompetence in manufacturing was caused by companies that could accompli organize production this is also a theme in the work of seymour mehlman and his book profits without production so there is a way to do this there are companies right now in new york michigan elsewhere which could begin to fill these orders so we import for example
2:54 am
a large share of the advanced technology used in mass transportation systems we can be building things here in the united states so this is the vision of victor ruth the great united auto workers leader we have these models people like michael moore have advocated this so what i've done is i've done detailed research that interviewed companies that say they're willing to do this we just have. to have an industrial policy in this country we have a half industrial policy or a covert industrial policy in which you know you throw a little bit money to some companies like oregon iron works and they were able to develop more in the process of developing a prototype to make light rail vehicles in the united states outside of portland but you know you can't just have a level playing field for both transnational corporations that make mass transit goods as well as you know domestically anchored firms the domestic anchoring is very very important as is the need to have advanced r. and d. policy so these things really the obama administration has moved slightly in the
2:55 am
right direction on this the republicans seem to want to drag down the united states and destroy its economic base even though they claim to be patriotic so we manufacturing has been the straight that this country even if you wanted to think about you know real politic in china i mean right now we're outsourcing as jeffrey sinclair and in counterpunch pointed out in the book of his we're outsourcing even military production to china and places like sixty minutes of show that a lot of electronic components are coming from overseas that the military uses so there is a way to come by you know. patriotic vision so-called so people so many people seem to be worried about that with building up the economy and manufacturing essential to that as john points out you can't replace you can't get services you can't trade in services we need manufacturing to improve the trade deficit the budget deficit the fiscal crisis to the extent that it exists although granted a lot of corporations are sitting on their capital they're not investing in r.
2:56 am
and d. so one necessity for supporting manufacturing is to have things like democratic firms and cooperatives and alternative banks that we move our money and so we need the synergy between people moving their money into these production platforms to get the high paid jobs that we need all right jonathan feldman we are out of time thanks so much for being on the kaiser report. thank you for having me it was a pleasure all right not going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report with me max kaiser and stacy herbert one time my guest jonathan feldman if you had to send me an e-mail please do so because a report of our t.v. dad are you next time ask us that well you know. something. law ease beneath. thousands of meters of costs control.
2:57 am
for many. but dangerous even to those who keep it to distance. we've just. seen he used. to. say. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so horrid you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything
2:58 am
you thought you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture. download the official up location cellphones choose your language stream quality and enjoy your favorite. if you're away from your television or it just doesn't die so now with your mobile device you can watch artsy anytime anywhere. hold it hold it. hold it hold it hold it hold it hold it hold it. od up.
2:59 am
the speed. of her. body which. ultimately. all of the misleading good. luck just seems to live in and. i come out of my mind i'm a better job and.

37 Views

info Stream Only

Uploaded by TV Archive on